Skating along the canal is a great way to experience life

Published 4:38 pm, Thursday, March 13, 2014

The Champlain and Erie canals freeze early in Waterford, and skating on them helped me avoid hating this extremely cold winter. In fact, I'm kind of in love.

I'm not a very good skater, and my only grace is that I do not constantly fall. But I like to be on the ice, and canal ice is plain magic. You get to go under bridges and near barges and tug boats.

Above and around you life is being life. Cars, trucks and buses pass. Houses sit still, waiting for people to come home. Yards hold snow. Snow holds summer promises tight, snuggling barbeque grills and backyard chimneys.

Under you, the water is another self, solid and full of personality. Clear chunks let you see down through a champagne fizzle of air bubbles. On the surface, a whirl of maple seeds sits like a flower. A beer can skitters with the wind, catches in dimples made by snow melts.

The ice is not Zamboni smooth, and the warmer it gets, the less lovely the skating is. But fresh air is more invigorating than gym air, and, instead of televisions, I get to watch real things. I get to go inside a lock. Be at the base of concrete walls that are 50 feet tall. Look at doors frozen open by 5 feet of ice.

I marvel at the canal for what it is, and what it was. There is a new strip of bike path in Cohoes that highlights another lock, between the Harmony Mills and some mill housing downtown. The lock sits quite still in grass and dirt, and now snow. You don't need skates to get close to those blocks of stacked stone.

The labor that went into making the canals is impossible to imagine. That we abandoned such a giant project seems folly and makes me wonder how long roads and cars will serve our transportation needs.